There is a remote corner in central China that in the 1990s became ground zero for the largest HIV epidemic ever seen.. It is estimated that more than a million people were infected due to an unhealthy blood donation market that attracted farmers in exchange for 45 yuan, around six euros.. Enough money to feed an entire family for a week in that then very poor land.

In Shanghai county, Henan province, there were as many as 22 villages that earned the label “AIDS villages” because they had hundreds of infected inhabitants.. There were entire families of HIV positive people, from grandfather to grandson.

It was a massacre during the following years due to the lack of antiretroviral drugs, which did not arrive until decades later.. Today, in the communities of Shanghai, which still carry the stigma of AIDS due to the many cases that remain from the end of the last century, almost every family has a relative who died of HIV.

These villages were visited in the 90s by a gynecologist named Gao Yaojie, the first to warn of the HIV epidemic that existed in Henan due to the dilapidated blood transfusion centers, installed in vans that were taken to the countryside.. Although they were illegal, they were supported by local officials, who campaigned to attract neighbors to donate and thus extract the plasma.

For donors, it was quick and easy money to earn.. Realizing that they could get much more by milking their veins than by pumping milk from cows or taking care of their land, farmers spent years going daily to these centers to make donations.. Henan became the country's great blood bank.

The problem was that unsterilized needles were reused or bags from different donors were mixed and reinjected into other people.. Dr. Gao reported all of this after discovering the first positive test in one of her patients, who had later been infected by a transfusion during an operation.

According to data later revealed by China's own Ministry of Health, up to 43% of donors in these illegal centers contracted HIV.. In the 2000s, Gao began giving talks at hospitals and schools, and speaking to the media, both Chinese and foreign, trying to reveal the public health crisis there was.

His work earned him recognition from international organizations, including the UN.. But the response of the local Henan administration was to try to silence her.. He spent almost a month under house arrest.

In 2009, the doctor moved to the United States. There she became an activist who, through her experience, denounced the censorship that prevails in China, starting with the fear that local authorities have when it comes to alerting the central government in Beijing with bad news and the danger that this entails. to stop future epidemics in time, such as the Covid that broke out in Wuhan at the end of 2019. Gao died at the age of 95 last Sunday at his home in Manhattan.